A Little Too Late
by Eymxil
Summary: Someone once said that a full life was a life lived not without pain but without regrets. Nothing is without its price, but it is in his power to choose what happiness he pursued. He did not see it then, but she was the price for achieving his lifelong dream. If he had stayed, perhaps he would have been her happy ending, but she has moved on and he will not let his story end sadly.


**A Little Too Late**

It hadn't been his original intention to attend the reunion. At least, it hadn't been until she had confirmed her own attendance. The man over the phone had been kind enough to check her RSVP status for him without pressing as to why the information was relevant. When most people spoke of him, they knew only of his professional career, but those that had attended upper secondary schooling with him likely remembered the intimate relationship he had shared with her. No one would think it suspicious to inquire about an old flame.

Genji leans back into the leather of his seat as his thoughts drift to the young girl he spent his school years with. At that age, before the soccer scholarship that would take him to Italy for over a decade, he had been a different person. He had been a quiet student that lacked the charm and confidence he presently possessed, but his passion for soccer had been as strong then as it was now. She had been a studious student herself with a voice like rain and a smile that could have broken many a man stronger than him.

Twelve years was a long time. It was difficult to fathom that he had been absent from Japan for so many years. The country had felt unfamiliar when he had stepped off of the plane despite the eighteen years he had spent there previously, but all the same something about it had felt like home. He'd walked down the streets of his birth country, eaten the foods of his childhood, gazed at the night skies that had been the background to so many memories; pieces of him had never left Japan.

When he closes his eyes, the memory of his last moments with her is as fresh as if he were still waiting on the plane that would take him one step closer to his dream rather than sitting in a new apartment over a decade later. That day she had known that something was amiss long before he had worked up the courage to speak seriously with her. It was to be his last day with her for a number of years, and he was desperate to imprint the image of her smile upon his heart.

Her smile was something that he had carried with himself throughout the years. Whenever he locked himself in his room with homesickness, the memory of her voice calling his name was what he held onto like a precious memento. The fleeting taste of her lips upon his own in their first kiss was a reminder as to why he couldn't pick up the phone and call her when the urges came. In promising that he would return for her, he had made her his reason to train harder, but a temptation, one he struggled to resist, to return home.

Time had tainted his final memory of her, but it did not lessen the sharp guilt that the image of her tears brought. At the tender age of eighteen, he would not have blamed her if she had gone into a fury and lashed out at him. Instead, she had visibly choked down a sob and, of all things she had the right to do to him, smiled for him. In a sense, it was more beautiful than any of her other grins despite the tears in her eyes. He was leaving her, but she had smiled for him.

He had never told anyone of his promise to his high school sweetheart. The public would have eaten the story up; females would have found it romantic and endearing, males would have joked around about his situation through their jealousy. His publicist would have loved, in fact, to arrange an interview concerning the matter, but this was a private moment he meant to keep for himself. It was a promise that kept him tied down to her, and not something meant to be put up to speculation. That moment, one of few, had been purely theirs and theirs alone.

Friends would have called him a fool if they knew of her, and for a good number of reasons. Very few would have believed that it had been in his right to make her such a promise because he had only been eighteen at the time; far too young an age to recognize if he truly loved a girl. Those that didn't see the words as foolish would have thought him an idiot for not keeping contact with her while he had been training in Korea. His actions would have been perceived as a strange balance of immature and mature.

No one would have known what it was like to be in his position. He had been at the cusp of fulfilling his dream, but his heart had been torn between his passion and the woman he could easily spend the rest of his life with. They would not have been able to understand how he had struggled and grappled with the two on his own before reason had won out. Soccer was a lifelong passion, and it was a once in a lifetime opportunity that he could not have allowed to pass him by.

At the end of the day, he had made the logical choice that any individual would have taken though that did not make it any easier to leave her behind. In the split second between their first kiss and her abrupt departure from the classroom he had been forced to face the broken expression upon her face. It had killed him inside to know that it was his fault. It killed him more to know that she had left before he could choke out the three words he had been building up the courage to speak: I love you.

Genji had made another promise in that empty classroom, but this one was to himself. He would not return to Japan until he could walk to her with his head held high with the proof that the pain he had caused her had not been for nothing. It was the reason that he would not allow himself to contact her though on some nights the only thing he wanted was to hear her voice. As a man, he could not possibly face her until he could show her that their sacrifices had been for a happier ending to their story.

He has never walked with such pride in his stride or head held higher than when he steps through the entrance of the bar. Old friends and acquaintances immediately flock around him like a moth to the flame, but he barely even registers their presences beyond a few handshakes and light-hearted greetings. His words are distracted and, to be quite honest, he doesn't even remember half of the faces that stare back at him now. His eyes are picking through the crowd of people for the only person that he wants to see at that moment.

For the first time that night he allows his apprehension to affect his demeanor. Twelve years is a long time, and he knows better than most how much a person can change in that time. What if he doesn't recognize her? More terrifying yet, what if she isn't the same person that he left behind? Of course, he understands that there are many ways that she will have changed since her adolescence, but at her core, in the things that made her who she was, would she still be the same girl that he fell in love with?

All of these fears slip away like water when his eyes alight upon her. It has been twelve years, but even through all of that time he knows that it is her when he sees her. She has clearly grown from a slender and somewhat sheepish girl into the beautiful woman that is seated before him. Her appearance has changed in small ways, but it is her all the same. It is her eyes though that captivate him. Her eyes are exactly how he remembers them. Here, is the woman that he can finally face as a man.

In a matter of minutes and verbal exchanges everything comes crashing down. Already he can feel himself withdrawing as his public persona, the face and attitude that he has adapted to wearing for the adoring eye of the public, takes his place. A few more words are exchanged between them, and then he slips back into a group of friends he has had little contact with because it is the only thing familiar to him at the moment. Among them, he knows his roles and expectations well, and there is a comfort in doing something that he knows by heart.

She is married.

The night carries on for several more hours, but the only thought looping through his mind is that she wears a ring upon her hand, but it is not his ring. At the other end of the bar, she sits among her friends with a sweet smile that no longer looks natural to him. Perhaps it is because that smile is no longer his. Their laughter rings through the air though they are on the other side of the room, but somehow hers is the only one that he can hear, and then she is gone. His head hurts.

It is nearly two in the morning when he steps out of the bar and into the empty street. His old classmates had left over an hour ago, but he had waved their invitations off under the guise of needing to wake up early for his training in the morning. In reality, he had remained at the counter nursing his drink so that he did not have to face their questions for what little was left of his night. At that moment, he had wanted only a few minutes to himself.

Two months.

If Genji had returned just a few months earlier he would have swept her off of her feet. If she had waited just two months more, he would have been at her front doorstep with a bouquet of flowers and a heart that had never stopped being hers though he had not been there for her physically. They would have reconnected with each other…fallen in love all over again, and then it would have been his ring, any ring that she would have wanted, that would have glittered upon her finger rather than that of a stranger's.

Genji would have been a liar if he had denied to seeing the occasional girl on the side while he had been in Korea. For the most part, he had been too focused upon his training to take notice of female attention until a friend brought the subject up to him. In high school, she had been with him, and when he had first arrived to Korea, he had just been another student. Only when he had begun to garner some attention for himself as a player did he begin to grab the attention of the public.

What few girls he had taken out, he had rarely seen more than twice. None of them had held the same appeal to him as her, but he couldn't deny that he had been somewhat interested in them. He was only human, and he had been sure that she had been on a few dates herself. At the end of the day though, those relationships had come to nothing. He had never looked at them like he had her. She was always going to be the girl he was going to return for, and no one could take her place.

The same couldn't be said of her.

She hadn't waited for him as he always thought she would. She had found someone else in the years that he had been gone, and she had fallen in love with that person. Someone else had come, and they had taken a place that he had always thought of as his own. How was it possible that she could have discovered these emotions in another person when he couldn't even feel even slightly the same way he did about her with another girl? How was it that she could have fallen in love when Genji already loved her so much?

Twelve years had passed, and he had come back her, but his return had been just a little too late. She had moved on from him, and had found her happiness in someone else. The pain born of their separation hadn't been for nothing, but it was Genji that had been left behind to bear the brunt of these emotions where she had made and found her own bliss. She didn't love him. Not anymore, anyways, so where did that leave him? Stumbling through the empty streets of Japan without the other half of his future.

Two fucking months. If he had been just two fucking months earlier, she would have been his. Even if she had moved on from him, he would have shown up at her doorstep every day to tell her why he loved her, and, in doing so, would have given her one more reason to love him. His happiness, the perfect future that included both his passion and her, the married life that he had wanted with her; it would have all been his if he had been just two fucking months earlier.

In twelve years she had moved on, and it was too late for any regrets that he might have. Genji could not see that if he allowed himself to second guess the decisions he had made all those years ago, he would break, but he did know that he could not bear the shame and guilt that would have been born of his regret. His choices had been made, and he could not change the decisions of his past. She had moved on where he hadn't let go of her, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Someone had once told him that a full life was a life lived not without pain, but without regrets. Nothing was without its price, but it was in his power to choose what happiness he pursued. He hadn't seen it then, had never even fathomed the idea of it, but she had been the price for achieving his lifelong dream. It would have done him no good to sit and wonder what would have happened if she had stayed…Not when she had fallen out of love with him long ago.

Genji could not become a man torn asunder by a promise that would never be fulfilled. If he became the ghost of a regret, then he would truly become nothing. She had moved on. She didn't love him. She didn't wait for him. Nothing that he does now will change what came to be, and perhaps that is what is most likely to break him above all else. It terrifies him to think that he may be left behind and trapped in this past, and that is the one thing he cannot allow to happen.

She has moved on, made her choice, and there is nothing left for him to do but the same.


End file.
